Thursday, 21 July 2016

The real damage of
last week’s abortive coup in Turkey is only now becoming apparent. Using the
excuse of the coup, Turkish President Tayyip Erdoğan has moved to implement
political and administrative changes he could not get through the normal political
process. Key to this move is purging thousands of civil servants, educators,
judges, army officers who just might hold an opinion he doesn’t like. Then he declares a state of emergency.

The ‘cleansing’ was so swift and so thorough
that very few people doubt these lists had been prepared long before the coup
attempt. Now the state of emergency will give him unprecedented and unchecked
powers to transform the country any way he likes. It would not be surprising if
a new condition of military or civil service employment is swearing an oath of loyalty to
Tayyip Erdoğan.

Could it get this bad in Turkey?

While the
political damage is bad enough, the real long-term damage is to the country’s
educational system. Erdoğan simply is not comfortable around very well
educated, well-travelled people – people who tend to ask awkward questions.
Thousands of teachers have been fired, university rectors forced to resign, and
anyone identified as an ‘academic’ –
formerly a title of some pride – has been banned from leaving the country.
Erdoğan considers universities as breeding grounds for opposition to his grand
ideas of a reformed Turkey. The only
problem is that his vision of reform
doesn’t include things like dissent, innovation, creativity, or – God forbid –
smoking and drinking. Oh, and by the way, in Erdoğan’s Turkey, each bride would
produce at least three children.

He gave lip
service to the idea of more universities and then failed to staff them or
staffed them mainly with his henchmen whose idea of a ‘proper’ student was someone who kept his mouth shut and did what he
was told. A vice-rector of one of these new universities was quoted as saying
how much more he preferred the company of illiterate peasants to his educated
colleagues.

Turkey used to
have a university system that proudly stood out in the region. Universities
like the Middle East Technical University, the private Koç and Sabancı
universities, Bosphorus University and others were centres of real scholarship.
Now their very independence, the independence without which real scholarship
and research do not exist, is under threat. Erdoğan cannot stand dissent or
free thinking in any form. And can you think of any self-respecting university
where dissent and free thinking are not critical parts of the entire process?
He has yet to grasp the fact that some pretty good ideas emerge from just such
messy dissent.

Erdoğan doesn’t
care much about cultural creativity because such creativity is by definition
messy and rebellious. One gets the impression that he and his followers much
prefer the traditional sound of the Janissary band to the rebellious and defiant notes of
Beethoven’s 5th Symphony.

But Erdoğan should
care a great deal about economic creativity and innovation – without which the
country will remain buried in the Third Division. His loud chorus of supporters
loves the statistics that Turkey is so much better off now than when the ruling
party took power in 2002. True enough, but
completely irrelevant. When the ruling Justice and Development Party took
over the country was in a deep depression with a ruined financial system. By
comparison, anything would look good. But the main reason for the improvement is that the government’s economic team followed the International Monetary
Fund’s recovery prescription to the letter. By about 2010, Erdoğan got
tired of those constraints and thought he could run things better. Big mistake.

The current trend
is not healthy. Inflation is creeping back up, the currency is depreciating
rapidly, unemployment is up, investment is down, growth has slowed, and the private sector is
heavily indebted in foreign currency. Not a recipe for strong performance.

But more than the
raw numbers, the very structure of the economy should concern any serious
official. The Turkish economy is filled with yesterday’s businesses -- businesses like construction, cement,
bottling, simple metal bashing, or assembly of someone else’s products. None of
these produce much value added. Turkey has a strong food processing industry,
but take a look at the equipment all those companies use. You will have a very
hard time finding any part that is Made
in Turkey.

Where is the
innovation? Where is the investment? Where are the new, ground-breaking
industries – industries that didn’t exist a few years ago and will lead the way
into the future? Part of the answer is that Turkish businessmen tend to prefer
construction – with a fairly definite payoff – to the potential, if unsure,
rewards of investing in innovation.

Beyond investment,
such innovation requires the very messy, creative, free-thinking environment
that Erdoğan hates. Can you imagine that icon of free thinking, Steve Jobs,
flourishing in an environment where dissent and free speech are crushed? Or
just imagine Einstein with his radical theory of how the world really works
flourishing in the oppressive Turkish environment.

Turkey does not
lack for brilliant, talented people. But it is very hard to see them sticking
around in such a stifling cultural, academic and economic environment. It is
much easier to see that brilliance and talent flourishing in other countries.

Sunday, 17 July 2016

It
will be a long time, maybe never, before the real story of the attempted coup
in Turkey emerges. What we don’t know far exceeds what we do know. The only
thing that is clear at the moment is that the one person to benefit from this
farce is President Tayyip Erdoğan. Even if the coup had succeeded it was the exact opposite of what Turkey needs.

Well-armed with a full magazine of
self-righteous, theatrical anger he now has the perfect excuse to eliminate
anyone who might conceivably oppose him in purges that would make Joseph Stalin
blush. Erdoğan loudly proclaimed that he is protecting his version of ‘democracy’ which probably doesn’t vary
much from what the military would have imposed.

The conspiracy
theorists in Turkey are having a field day with such claims as ‘This is nothing more than Erdoğan’s Reichstag fire’ – a reference to the 1933 burning of the German parliament
building, started by the Nazis but blamed on some hapless Dutch communist, that presented Adolf Hitler with the perfect excuse to move against all
his opponents. It seems a little far-fetched to say that Erdoğan was actively
behind the attempted coup, but it is not inconceivable that he had some prior intelligence about such a move and that he knew it would fail. He was not slow to take
advantage of this golden opportunity to grab the small bit of power that still eluded
him.

The coup that turned into deadly farce

It is the sheer incompetence of the
plotters that generates some questions. The Turkish army is fairly skilled in
coups, but apparently the plotters missed the course called Coup Making 101.
The first step in any successful coup is to arrest the civilian leadership as
was done in 1960 and 1980. This was not done. As soon as I heard that Erdoğan
was making public statements I knew the whole thing was over. The effect
Erdoğan’s broadcast was the same as Hitler announcing he was alive after the
assassination attempt on July 20, 1944. Anyone even thinking of joining the
plotters had a sudden change of heart and did absolutely nothing. It is fair to
say the same thing happened in Turkey. Who knows what would have happened if the plotters had been marginally more efficient?

In a final tragi-comic step a group
of eight plotters swiped a helicopter and flew to Greece to ask for political
asylum. This is just what Greece needs. The Greek authorities must be groaning
and asking why, oh why, couldn’t they have just flown a few minutes more and
landed in Bulgaria. As of Sunday night the helicopter has been returned, but
there has been no decision announced on the men.

This is not a problem the Greeks need

As far as Erdoğan is concerned the
real culprit is clear – his one-time ally Fetullah Gülen who now lives on a
farm in Pennsylvania in the United States. Erdoğan has long accused Gülen of
setting up a ‘parallel’ state structure in Turkey to challenge Erdoğan’s
government. According to Erdoğan, the tentacles of the Gülen organization reach
deep into the military, judiciary, police and administrative institutions of
Turkey – all the organizations now being ‘cleansed’
by the thousands. In addition, I would not be surprised to see him build up a
strong para-military force answerable only to him to counter any future
discontent with the military ranks.

But the real victims in this idiocy
that cost too many lives are not the plotters who deserve every punishment they
get, but the long-suffering people of Turkey. Yes, Tayyip Erdoğan is a typical
autocrat who has absolutely no regard for individual freedoms or respect for
the incredible diversity of Turkey. But the solution is never going to be
replacing one autocrat with another – the army. Too many of

Erdoğan’s opponents think there is only a binary choice in Turkey -- an oppressive, Islamic Erdoğan or an oppressive, secular army. They are missing the point.

Perhaps Erdoğan’s biggest fault in
his long period in power is to strengthen the already dominant tendency in Turkey
to revere the ‘strong man’ the ‘man on a white horse’ who can solve all
the country’s problems with the stroke of a pen. Instead of building up and
strengthening governing institutions like the judiciary, the central bank, the
security services or police he made them subservient to his will. Consequently,
very few people, if any, have the least bit of faith in the institutions that define a
modern political entity. No one in any political or administrative position
wants to make a decision without consulting the ‘reis’
– the chief to see which way he is leaning.

Many of Erdoğan’s opponents fall
into this same trap. Instead of the hard, time consuming process of building an
alternative political movement stressing process
and institution-building they, too,
look for a simple answer – a charismatic hero to challenge Erdoğan. This latest
farce of a so-called coup attempt only shows that that simply isn’t going to
happen. Far from removing what they perceived as a ‘threat’ to Turkey the coup plotters only succeeded in strengthening
Tayyip Erdoğan’s iron control of the country.

Monday, 4 July 2016

Listening
to the fevered rhetoric about immigration during Britain’s recent referendum
you would think that a tsunami of
starving dark-skinned people from the nether regions of the world was about to
engulf England’s ‘green and pleasant land.’

Hyperventilating opponents of the
European Union left the impression that the village greens and quaint little
tea houses were about to be
over-run with Romanian camper vans and swarthy Bulgarians barbecuing
God-knows-what on their handy grills. Barefoot, somewhat grimy children would
swarm over the once-pristine cricket pitches gobbling up the tea and crust-less
watercress sandwiches so carefully set aside for the players.

Is this at risk of being over-run by Eastern European immigrants?

Unfortunately, facts in highly emotional referendum votes are thin on the ground.
What may have begun as principled opposition to the European Union easily
morphs into tribal fears of anything
different. Since the referendum these tribal fears have led to several very
ugly racial attacks in various parts of the country as the UK’s version of the
Klu Klux Clan gets going. We were in Southampton last week-end when a peaceful
Moslem commemoration of the end of Ramadan had to be cancelled because of fears
of racist attacks. The very next day there was a demonstration of people loudly
opposed to any and all refugees.

Britain’s political classes should
be ashamed of themselves for failing to confront the issue of immigration
head-on long before the vote. I cannot recall one single rational debate on the
issue. The stage was left to those who could only express their inchoate
outrage at the mere thought of freedom of movement with the European Union. All
this anger at the imagined dire state of affairs in the United Kingdom, this
frustration at failing to fit in to a globalized world had found its source –
the hapless Eastern European immigrant willing to work at jobs no Brit would
consider.

Even now, almost two weeks after the
vote, there is no thoughtful discussion of the issue, no debate on real issues.
For example,

1.Exactly
how many immigrants from the EU are now the Britain?

2.What
percentage of the total British population do they make up? Is a big percentage,
small percentage, or completely statistically insignificant?

3.How
would Britain’s health care service work without these recent arrivals? When my
wife was in hospital the wonderful, caring nurses and staff were from all over
the world. There was not one native Brit among them.

4.How
would London’s booming (until the referendum anyway) construction business
thrive without the thousands of Polish workers?

Also,
how much investigation has there been into the dark side of immigration – the
exploitation of illegal immigrants?

None of this has been openly
discussed, and irrational fears have replaced facts. Many people are now
calling for a so-called points system
– similar to what Australia uses – to match would-be immigrants to skills
required in Britain. Ah yes, but there’s a catch. You might allow in a highly
skilled computer expert, but what about his family? Do they get to join him, or
do they go to the back of the queue? And then there is there is the
bureaucracy. Right now, the UK has absolutely no idea how many people overstay
their visa, the border agency is overwhelmed, and tracking people once inside
the country is impossible. When informed about someone overstaying their visa
the police just laugh and say it is not their problem. And UK officials are
supposed to set up something as sophisticated as a point-scoring system!? A
daunting task for a country whose rail service would embarrass moderately
prosperous Third World countries.

Furthermore, there’s a potential
immigration nightmare if the UK leaves the EU in a huff. Right now there are
thousands of refugees living in squalid conditions near Calais. Without a
border agreement, what would keep the French from solving that problem by
shipping them all to the UK? Why should the French cooperate by keeping them in
France rather than shipping them to the green fields of Kent just across the
water?

Is Sangatte coming to Kent?

There are perhaps legitimate reasons
to believe the UK was never going to be a good fit into the European Union.
Given its long history of parliamentary democracy and a globally respected
legal system it is easy to see how UK politicians would reject the very idea of
that system being subordinated to the recent, untested EU system of
governance. Unfortunately, the EU leaders are tone-deaf to the rising
complaints of EU over-reach and are threatening the entire structure. And here
we are now at a major cross-roads. Will grown ups or sulky children take us forward?

I have no idea who the next leader
of the Conservative Party will be or just how successful he or she will be in
the endless rounds of exit negotiations. I only hope they remember that Britain
is a parliamentary democracy, and that parliament should not abdicate its
responsibilities to a referendum.

If the difficult question of
immigration is to be part of those negotiations let us at least have some facts
instead of raw emotion. Is immigration really a problem, or is it a solution to
Britain’s manpower and brain-drain problems? The time for a serious discussion on immigration is long overdue.

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About Me

I worked as a fund manager and investment banker in Turkey and the Middle East for 25 years. Over the years I have travelled extensively throughout the region and have met many of the leading government officials, business and cultural leaders. I am married to a Greek and now divide my time between London, Turkey, and an island in the Aegean.